Mental Skills and Self Talk for Ultrarunning with Karim Ramadan | Koopcast Episode 64

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is a real treat and sadly a topic that we don't discuss nearly enough it is all about mental skills for ultra runners on the podcast today i have kareem ramadan who is a PhD candidate specializing in sports psychology and in particular self-talk i came across kareem's work during research for the second edition of my book where i quickly came to appreciate his take on self-talk as well as how all of the various mental skills of awareness focus self-talk imagery and the like can be organized throughout the year i don't need to tell you that mental skills are important particularly for ultra runners cliches like ultra running is 90 mental and the other 10 is mental and the longest distance is the six inches between your ears abound in the sport but those cliches are just that they are noise and provide zero direction on what you should actually do the fact of the matter is is i have always viewed performance through a psycho biological lens where your physiology things like aerobic capacity muscle strength and bioenergetics

determines your maximum capacity for performance and psychology determines how much of that capacity you can actually utilize this is important framework to understand because mental skills are literally the key in making the most out of your physiological limits yes mental skills are skills nonetheless and you have to develop them alongside the intervals the miles and the vertical we typically refer to as quote-unquote training so during the course of this conversation in a practical and actionable manner we walk through these different mental skills and more importantly how you can lay them out and implement them throughout the year there's an order to developing mental skills just like we view an order to building our physical skill set with mileage and vertical cream also takes this opportunity to humbly put me on the psychology couch for a few moments of a quick analysis and i hope you all have a lot of fun with that i hope you find this conversation enlightening on how you can improve your mental skills for ultra running so here we go let's get right into it here's my conversation with kareem ramadan i like how you're approaching your book it always attracts me to find books that have this foundation over scientific work and then when the author or the coach takes it to the actual practical field uh to make the link between research work and the practical field is something that we kind of at

least in sports psychology is something that we actually lack so this connection that you're making is something we really need for the advancement of sports psychology because we have a lot of research work that is not directly tested and reported by those who are doing some practical work back to the researchers um this is something we're trying to do uh here in greece uh in the university of tessaly we're trying to really apply our research work in the field and try to report back and see what to manipulate what to change collect more data because we really need to get more into the mind of athletes in specific sports and if we want to think how detailed things can be we can even differentiate between let's say in running you have so many distances and disciplines and the sports psychology mental training and self-talk in specific would differ between all those so it's not you cannot apply what you could use with a let's say a marathoner with an ultra marathon runner it just doesn't work a hundred percent and one of the confounding things that i have that i've struggled with a lot in ultra marathon specific and specific with sports psychology and self-talk is that and if you look at the traditional endurance disciplines a lot of the sports psychology is i'm gonna totally kind of like bastardize this to somebody like yourself who actually formalize for who actually studies it

formally but a lot of the sports psychology that athletes use are to essentially like amp themselves up or to like be very intensive i guess is the best way that i can describe it you know it's like go push let's see how hard i can you know make this effort let's see how hard i can push at the end of the race and things like that but because of the the duration of ultra marathon running and it's so low intensity and requires such patience there's there's the need for this undulating ability to push and then back off at the same time and you even see that with like the associative strategies and the disassociative strategies right where you can be very internal and monitor your breathing but you also need to like check the scenery out and just like escape from the from your current reality for for a certain point of time so that that's what it that's what makes it so confounding for me and i'm really happy to hear you say that that the translation from the scientific world to the field of play or the field of practice is extremely difficult because we even find that difficulty in in a physiology setting right but it's even more difficult in a psychology setting i was studying psychology in my bachelor some years ago and i have a friend of mine who participated in a half marathon and he decided to jog it and let's say he could finish the half marathon in one hour 20 but he decided just to go for two hours

two hours 15 something like this just to feel the spirit of people he really wanted and then when we finished we he was sharing the experience and he said he was making fun of it but it got to me in a way in a different perspective he said i was motivating a lot of people that were walking and i would say okay come on let's go and then you'd see them sprint and then stop to walk again um and they're like an hour away from the finish and this here it just caught to my head to the term of management effort management or where where can we fit uh motivational cues this is now how i look at it so self-talk or let's say mental training in general is quite broad and um we can really structure it in depth and when we speak of a half marathon i mean i have a few athletes who are specialized in half marathons i don't think we ever used motivational words uh not even halfway through never right uh it just puts you at a different level of course it's something individual what suits the athlete but in general we stay away from something that pumps you and and so what you're saying is is like even in a half marathon situation at least in the first half of it there still is this undulating piece of you need to stay relaxed and you just and you need to push at different points in time shorter than a half marathon uh our latest experiment in self-talk um practical experiment was about a year ago uh it was with a group

of 20 people um it's not published yet but i can share the results um 20 people who took self-talk uh intervention and 20 people who did not uh we noticed that or actually we used the maximal aerobic speed test of which the runners according to their coach they had to run two kilometer time trial uh what we did when we retested them with the self-talk strategy is we did not use any motivational words until the last 400 meters or a bit more than this 600 meters so even in a short distance two kilometers motivation does not like a motivational keyword would really put you out of your effort and this brings us to the notion of we kind of have to redefine or re-explain what the mental toughness is or mental or what's mental training or what do we expect from mental training mental training does not really put you above your physical capacity much it helps you manage it it's just about management and being smart and aware of what's going on if you start too fast and you already have blood black state accumulating too quick you just cannot push on the third quarter or the fourth quarter of the race you just can't so it's just about really good management there's this really famous quote by one of the original one of the originators of sports psychology and i'm i'm blanking

on the name so you can fill it in if i uh if you can come up with it but he described it as physiology determines your maximal capacity and psychology determines the amount of that maximal capacity that you can actually utilize that and that's the that's the sentiment right we all have our physiological yeah and that comes from the the kind of some of the origins of the psycho biological model of of fatigue which are which you're very familiar with but let's try to like give this some structure right because i want to i want to mainly talk about self-talk and athletes as you have encountered in your practice their construction of self-talk tends to be a really narrow one right they think about it as a coach yelling at them like basketball or football type of setting right a coach yelling at them or them trying to like motivate themselves for a specific task but in reality there's this really broad array of of different types of self-talk that athletes choose to use and also can use and some of them may be more effective than others in certain situations as we've already been alluding to earlier so let's like set the table with that first and kind of describe what all of these different i'm gonna call them methods but i don't i just i don't even have the vocabulary to describe it right okay if we want to just describe what's soft talk it's quite simple it's the inner dialogue that we have we can never stop self-talk this inner dialogue it's always ongoing if we want to take self-talk to the world of

sports we need to utilize it or modify it the best way possible to perform the best way possible self-talk first is organic it's something that comes organically this organic self-talk can be divided into different types it can be positive it can be negative and it can be neutral now from these types we can also divide it into um once we we start to to modify self-talk or use self-talk strategy we would call it structured self-talk we start to structure things in structural self-talk we can also divide it into different categories um it can be motivational it can be instructional that gives a certain instruction or technical um we can call it whatever we want and it can be recently this has been added called goal-oriented self-talk this is the latest additive um so yeah this is how we can somehow structure self-talk once we start to explore our own organic soft talk then we can start to modify and see what's going on because if we want to use traditional methods or what organically comes out of coaches we hear a lot of coaches tell their athletes try to focus right what happens right how do we try to focus i never understood this right i had a coach when i was a kid yelling at me it's telling me like uh try harder i would just push as much as

i can and then i collapse i i never got it but also we can look at it in a different way and a word or a thought in our head becomes an image it's quite basic if i tell you now don't think of a pizza you have a pizza image in your head just by saying the word right i'm sure you have right no 100 i want pizza now so once we have a thought the thought will become an image and the brain will follow the image this also brings us to coaching methods um we kind of like to tell the coaches not to tell the athletes what they don't have to do right but rather tell them what what you want them to do the direction you want them to go to so this is quite something basic with self-talk uh never start with something or never state something you don't want to do we hear so many people in races saying don't quit don't quit right uh they already have the image of quitting this will bring them down furthermore and so one of the things that athletes are going through when they're as they're preparing for an ultra marathon is they tend to get focused on the race itself like what am i going to do during the first part of the race the middle part of the race and the last part of the race what should i be saying to myself what parts of this organic self-talk should i um uh uh should i like pull out to help maximize the performance or to not quit to your to your phrase earlier but the reality is is that needs to be something that's honed in practice first and then executed during the race because just like any

type of endurance training there's there's like a chronic i'm going to use i'm going to use a physiology word to describe this there's a chronic adaptation that occurs where you practice a skill a certain amount of time and whatever that dose response is that's your wheelhouse maybe you can illuminate that for us but you practice a skill a certain amount of time in practice and then in the race you have honed it in so much that it becomes something that is actually applicable self-talk is purely a skill it's something that we can train as much as we can when we talk about organic self-talk we can really compare it about let's take for example um elite athletes in sports psychology we try to study the best athletes and we derive a lot of things by studying them let's say some elite athletes have somehow a genetic predisposition to have a higher vo2 maybe it's where they're born their lifestyle the environment supported their system to have a higher vo2 some of them already have a really efficient organic self-talk organically they use positive keywords organically they give themselves instructions and we've done a lot of interviews and research work with elite let's say marathoners or elite athletes and i always notice that organically they're already they have the skill of really good efficient self-talk that works best for them if we want to go to sub elite levels intermediate and beginner athletes then this organic self-talk it's just like someone who has a low vo2 that we want to improve or low aerobic capacity that we want to

improve so if you're telling me that a lot of ultra runners when they're training they're already focused so much on the race and what to say during the race uh soft talks a good self-talk strategies should be periodized so in base training we try to focus on certain keywords to say just to keep the body relaxed enjoying the process something like this and then gradually when we come closer to the race let's say you start with vo2 intervals about a couple of months earlier with these intervals comes a different type of self-talk and then during tempo phase comes a different type of self-talk so we kind of narrow down towards the race it's a build-up because if we start in base training to visualize and put keywords related to the race if it's a four or five months preparation i doubt there's there's a lot of athletes that will sustain this mental focus we will burn out mentally way before the race happens we see a lot of athletes before i've had this many times with athletes that they will tell me two three weeks before a race it really happens two weeks before a race that so many of them will tell me we really want the race to finish we just wanted to finish we wanted to pass they're not looking forward anymore for the race they're looking for the moment right after it's because they were too much in the race during the whole preparation starting in general phase so they burnt out you know what's so interesting about that i've never heard anybody describe the process of sports psychology in that way but it really mirrors what we do from a training programming standpoint so when we're when we're

programming the x's and o's of training one of the strategies that we use is we go from least specific to most specific from a physiological point of view and in an ultra marathon setting what that normally results in is you're doing lower volume higher intensity far away from the race and higher volume lower intensity closer to the race and then you get down to more specific elements you're like okay well if you're doing a mountainous race you're going to do a lot of your climbing as you get closer to the race and you can go on and on and on with the different details of iteration on that but to hear that the psychological flow should mirror that a little bit it's just absolutely fascinating for example if we start to visualize a race let's say three four months earlier that's just too much because sometimes we prescribe athletes to do imagery sessions let's say it comes in parallel with specific training sessions uh it's just too much to start too soon with race focus that's so that's so okay we're gonna get it we're gonna get into that structure because i i think that that's something to absolutely dig in but i want to go back a minute and you mentioned that a lot of the framework that sports psychologists used it trickles down from the best performers in the sport because they just have a natural gen probably genetic knack for cell you said this really interesting phrase self-talk that works for them i want you to describe that a little bit and are there any although it is going to be

individualized because the works for them piece connotates that this is an individual process yes it is what does that generally look like and then what can any athlete what are like the fundamentals that any athlete can take away from what we see in those high performers okay first i would like to start suppose we're starting with an athlete exactly intermediate level let's say you're starting with an athlete they come to you they want to have an ultra they want to run in a year from now um i assume you start with just a few assessments to see where they stand 100 and all this i like to do similar assessments just to explore their mental fitness or mental toughness i would like to explore organically how much how their goal orientation their self-talk their ability to visualize all this can be actually assessed in depth if they give honest answers of course if they give honest answers we can really understand their their mental toughness so i can give let's say a certain score of their capacity from that point i start to build up gradually toward the event if if someone whom i'm helping let's say in full coaching package then okay um i i would already periodize the sports psychology aspect with the physical training if i'm cooperating with their coach hopefully it's an open coach who be fine so that we sit together and discuss the whole plan together because it's a long process and i really

like it to be going in parallel with the physical preparation because they're interrelated and so in that sense let's just use our earlier framework of least specific to most specific and high intensity to low intensity the way that i'm the way the way that i am thinking that this plays out in real time is that the the cues of the self-talk during the high intensity during the high intensity pieces are are more intensive right they're more motivational hey you can do this push push past the pain all that other stuff and then as it moves along to the low intensity pieces of it it's more dissociative or or maybe even components of relaxation um it could be since it's something very individual but right with personally and with many athletes that i help i've seen an opposite uh the opposite way i've seen like at least for me i like to use dissociative methods when i am let's say in a 10k race i start to use dissociative methods on kilometer seven where the pain starts in a way to really hold that pace for just three more kilometers this is where i like to just disconnect and with good training at least this is something i do in mental training you can reach a point where you don't feel your legs much you can actually disconnect from the pain really truly hold on before well i think

this is a great point let's like review what a dissociative strategy looks like because a lot of people that vocabulary it's going to go all pun intended right over their heads okay it's a strategy that we could use in order to somehow disconnect from disconnect from internal feelings um it can be confused with self-talk a lot of athletes like i count for example this is my personal dissociative technique i like to count um in french foreign language it gives me something to focus on different from the body cues so like i try to block them in a way some people like to focus on scenery i mean we do this in some ultra runs or something we focus on scenery um but this perhaps focusing on scenery would not work so well in marathon and less than a marathon right this would work more in ultra runs because if we use external dissociation it would perhaps bring us closer to a state that we call flow state where you're flowing you're not really here you're disconnected somehow you're flowing you're focused on let's say the surrounding the mountains the views the rain perhaps you forget about the distance the body is just moving you've trained it to move so it's moving automatically um this is something if you learn and practice it well and try to induce this flow state which is part of dissociative techniques um you can be a great ultra marathon runner okay so that's dissociative that's a

dissociative strategy now there's a there's a counterpart to that as well that a lot of athletes use why don't you describe that uh some athletes um like to use let's say relax dissociative techniques on easier runs let's say so that they don't think of the race just disconnect a bit enjoy the surrounding yep and then on harder workouts they would use something more powerful but it depends it's something again very individual we really need to discuss with the athletes to try to find out what suits them best again we see organically what do they have how's the influence on training for example i've had an athlete who's visualizing the race on easy jogs and then you see it from the heart rate heart rate is high for nothing absolutely nothing and then just a couple of weeks same training nothing has changed same weather conditions we shift their focus to something else completely different non-running related and the heart rate was down by up to 10 beats that's a lot just because we reduced this excitement yeah 10 beats is a lot it's just if you're training on top of your aerobic capacity it would put you on something different well and the counterpart that i was really alluding to that i was that that i want to discuss as well are associative self-talk strategies turning inwards and focusing on what is going on in your body like how do your muscles feel what is your breathing rate look like do you have areas of discomfort and we're going to talk about like why those are

important skills to develop but when we talk about associative self-talk or inward looking strategies what are some other examples of that and use cases to where we can really link this it's a bit not far away from self-talk self-talk is what actually directs our focus to these different strategies but this is perhaps can be considered a bit close to mindfulness yeah so um mindfulness somehow let's say at least for runners um we can give an example uh let's say when you turn your focus internally trying to just check up your body see how it feels these sensations uh this is uh this shows that you really have a if you develop this good capacity to scan your body go to the little details like if you reach a point where you feel each toe how you're grabbing the ground from your foot yeah then you're really on this i tell this to my athletes so it's like a self-assessment tool yeah that you really have a good capacity to go internally to shift your focus internally and then you scan your body let's say and then in a split of a second you tell yourself like it's time to go out yeah and then you start to scan your surrounding this is external focus so this ability to switch the focus external internal uh it's quite a nice skill because you never know when you might need it and because we are able to shift the focus let's say externally then we are able to dissociate a bit from the physical sensation and the the the counterproductive part to either one of

those strategies is continuing to use them when they become deleterious so an example i'll give the example on either one of those and then you can elaborate on it because you're the expert so if you're using an internal strategy you're really focusing on your toes grabbing the ground but all of a sudden the pain that you are noticing because you're focusing so much internally gives you the cue to okay i need to slow down and or stop this pain is too much for me to handle the opposite happens if you start using if you start using the dissociative strategy too much as well because you're disconnected from reality your ability to focus in on a really intense effort can be not always is because you mentioned flow state but can be diminished or you're just using that attention in a inappropriate way i guess is what i'm saying uh if you're using it in an appropriate way it means uh you still have a fair amount of um concentration to switch between these types of focus if you don't then yes it's dangerous i've met a couple of athletes who have this capacity to completely dissociate they're not they're not here anymore and then yes when you have a certain pain you just don't feel it anymore then that's that's detrimental no athletes wants to wants to run over a pain for another four or five hours and then end up having some severe injury then you'd have to stop yeah obviously um so uh this is perhaps why i truly

recommend a lot of um a lot of my athletes to try to switch always switch in one session just to switch between these types just to always keep this ability give a good just like a fart lick just the same way psychological fartling both three four times in a row um a lot of athletes would let's say i would tell them to write uh our mental strategy for the training here on their hands so they can see it a lot of people would forget so now let's say okay i'm jogging one hour and i know on the 30th minute i want to do a one minute just quick body scan and then i want to go externally again for two times that's it it's quite simple it's just two three minutes is that so so let's get into the practical nuts and bolts of it right we i think all athletes they they can cut they can wrap their heads around the fact that they need to improve their mental skills they'll all they'll all address it but because there's no like training plan out there they can't go to ultra running magazine or whatever publication they read and find you know 20 weeks to your best you know self-talk or mental you know or mental skills uh you know 50k or whatever it is which exists in training all the time tuesday go out and do an hour wednesday do an hour and a half saturday is going to be your long run you can find those static training programs everywhere and it kit and my point with that is is from the physical training standpoint it gives everybody somewhat of a framework to work off of you don't see that as much with

with mental skill not as much because it's it's really individual it depends on a lot of factors it's tricky to do it on your own but it's doable at least for self-talk we can do with the basics i mean with this experiment that we did on those people that did the 2k time trial some of them improved in five weeks by 15 seconds wow just because of management it's just management it's not more than this i mean in five weeks physically you will improve but not to shave off 15 seconds off a 2k but if you checked for example i compared their splits in these five weeks okay the last 400 was way faster than the first uh the last uh 1k was pretty much faster than the first 1k because we really tried to manage create a self-talk plan that helps them manage their effort not to start too fast focus on certain things that allows time to pass somewhere in the middle because always uh the second third is where you want time to pass fast i had a romanian coach he used to say my grandma can start fast everyone can start fast and then when i started to compete more and more i noticed that we can always finish fast the last three four hundred meters because of this adrenaline rush so it all comes down to the second third well so in ultra marathon running we have this great tradition of passing training advice down from one generation to the next and when i first started coaching ultra marathon runners that was the only

source of information you had is what worked from the previous people before you and then the previous people before them there was very little literature that we could draw on that was specific to the sport and so practice from a coaching perspective or from a physiological coaching perspective it was a blend of extrapolating practice and research from the traditional endurance sports as well as taking what has been done in the past and seeing what works and what doesn't what i'm hearing from you and i've heard this from a number of people in sports psych world is that this individualization component to mental skills training is enhanced in an exponential way as compared to physical training the static training programs that you find in the magazines that might work for the you know huge swath of people but if you were trying to try to create that parallel in a sports psychology setting it pro it would be much more problematic yes um you can find in a lot of magazines a lot of blogs quite the basics of uh of mental training let's say goal setting talk to yourself positively something like this but in in self-talk and positive self-talk in specific i like to keep it optimistic not really positive yeah optimistic but very much grounded and realistic because if you're trained to let's say um run a half marathon in let's

say one hour and a half uh if you if you have good conditions maybe you might run a bit faster but not much faster and a few years ago i was facing a marathoner um she was training to run it in three hours 30 the maximum capacity the data and everything says so however if you have good conditions you might be able to run a few minutes faster um maybe first 10k she was running by 10 seconds faster per kilometer just because she said i feel nice so by kilometer 28 she hit the wall badly and then she had to walk uh so the day was messed up just because of this she forgot that it's a marathon it's a long way to go even if you feel nice in the beginning just stick to the plan stick to what the coach said obviously she didn't but uh uh yeah self-talk in a way i like to always put a high pretty much high effort on the beginning of the race to keep the athlete grounded not too positive really realistic for the first quarter really realistic stay to what the coach said stick to the effort because we see a lot of people rushing and then they start to slow down gradually this is something we don't really want so a really realistic self-talk for the beginning like stick to the pace don't get excited too much um race your own race try not to follow someone else the race is long and an ultra really race is really long it's a long journey it's not just a race i like to call it a journey you have a lots of ups and downs um a lot of

ultra runners here in greece we always when we start to plan the races we always say there will there will be a low point in the race oh yeah and we make a plan how to overcome this low point basically we try to analyze their previous low points what happened what were they thinking of during this low point what made it lower so when we investigated what actually happened during the low point we tried to find different uh answers for this uh for these uh states that they were at for example we figured out that one guy actually started faster but then there's another guy who had the knee irritation and he had the low point from this from this knee irritation he felt maybe i'm not fit enough for this the moment he said this to himself he just brought him down and down and down so we try with the athletes to really find answers this is a good strategy for ultra running because you're you're out there for many hours it's not just a few words and a few dissociative techniques to block it's not a tanky or a half marathon it's it's a journey out there if you sit now on one day you sit and you just reflect when you're running long runs you might be reflecting over a lot of things try to write down what you're reflecting you may write down i don't know um half a booklet that's a lot of thoughts ongoing so for a for an ultra run we we need to try to start with the negatives get answers for those the major negatives at least and then from that point we try to introduce a bit of motivation here and

there but what works best i believe for an ultra run is not really direct motivational self-talk but goal-oriented self-talk to remember why you're here doing this this works best because it's not it doesn't pump you like specific motivational self-talk i mean we can see those who do long jumps or high jumps it's quite an explosive sport they shout in the beginning they say something that pumps them yeah maybe they they slap themselves we've seen this or they stop they slap their legs and then this is it they explode yeah on ultra run you cannot really use this type of sharp motivation i would prefer to stay to stick to something goal-oriented like maybe you can write it on a piece of paper even like why am i here what do i love most about the sport stuff like this it would help us uh really stay rooted to why we're doing this for a lot of ultra runners perhaps it's ultra running comes with this spiritual aspect perhaps they can get can they can try to get connected to it but it's a bit difficult for those who are competing then it's more delicate for those who are competing let's say i ran once an ultra distance few months ago just crossing a certain distance crossing ridges it was so easy to get into the flow state and just really disconnect i i didn't realize i'm a couple of kilometers ahead ahead of my buddies because i wasn't really there i was just let's say i call it sinking in my own thoughts

i was thinking of different i like philosophy i was just thinking and i was there with my thoughts but in a race setup i wouldn't imagine that this would do me so well not well at all i need to be fully focused well a lot a lot of athletes a lot especially ultra marathon athletes they view mental skills through this lens of preventing the ultimate negative which is dropping out right especially at the 100 mile distance and i've used this exercise um with my athletes who are who have dropped out of a race before and maybe they might be chasing cutoffs and things like that but it can be universally like universally universally applied and whenever they've been in that really bad situation whether it resulted in a dnf or they just you know quit for several hours which happens in the middle of a hundred mile run uh quite frequently um i have them go and revisit that and draw out the scenario and sometimes literally journal out both the tactical things that went on to create that which is what we normally focus on i didn't eat enough i didn't drink enough i went too hard here you know whatever like the physical things that actually went on but also how they internalized all of those and then ask them to re and then i asked them to recreate that story to try to change it like what would they do in the exact same situation to try to change

it and then the advanced intervention that i've used with athletes is to have them internalize the worst situation that they have that they could completely contrive in their head they get lost it's the middle of the night they've been just been chased by a bear they've bonked their crew missed them like all 10 things all 10 bad things like kind of come down all at the same time then what would you do like what would you do tactically and then how would you internalize what was going on to get out of that situation and most of the times like sitting there in their chair they can come up with the answer right they can come up with the answer for the tactical things that they can do but also the psych like the psychology that goes behind getting out of that situation and i found that the athletes that have kind of gone through that they can get themselves they can get themselves out of like pretty hairy pinches you know that where they have screwed up in a race or had something bad happen to them or or whatever so this aspect of like training right there actually is like a cause and effect piece of where you you can have athletes like mentally put themselves in those situations and then when the time comes it's not always going to be exactly the same but they can draw upon figuring out the solutions to that a bad dnf is just like a bad breakup you really need to try to understand what went on and make peace with it if you don't make peace with it by understanding what went on it will be so hard to move on but of course in in races a lot of bad things can happen that we don't have really control over and how to

deal with it and to stay calm is a is quite a difficult skill um whenever i'm working with track athletes at least during pre-race preparation i try during uh let's say one of their intervals to ask them to stop the interval pause for three four seconds as if they fell mostly i do this with steeplechasers yeah so as if they fell and then they have to catch up with their with their teammates gradually to really learn how to catch up gradually not to rush and lose everything psychology is um in ultra running is a lot about just being in that situation and learn how to deal with it bad weather you have to be out in bad elements to learn how to run in rain or snow or whatever you have to learn how if you get lost you have to have good navigational skills to learn how to catch back your track again if you don't go through those in training and if you get them in a race setup then it's difficult for sure yeah i i like the the scenario recreation tool that's that's my layman's term for it by the way i know there's probably a proper proper name for it but but i like i like contriving those scenarios in a training environment and then using that as the tool to actually what happens on race day it's never exactly the same but there are always certain certain parallels to it um we try to do a lot of the scenarios and then we try

to find answers for those like what to tell yourself if you got lost what to tell yourself if you drop something um we try to just list as much things that might happen and try to find logical answers once we read and review those logical answers if it really happens to you you can talk yourself out of it yeah it's like having an advisor with you telling you it's okay it has happened and now we will do this now we will do that we will shift we will slow down whatever um so to really get into self-talk you need to start with a journal to write down things yeah so i was going to get into this uh kind of at the end but let's go let's go into it now what are some of like the low hanging fruit uh mental skills and or self-talk skills that athletes can start to implement that'll move that'll move the needle for them a little bit and then the next thing i want to go into is this this very initial self-assessment that they can take to see what like what what interventions might be the most effective for a particular individual so let's kind of go through the range and then let's go through how a person can tailor that range down okay and mental toughness let's say we can start let's suppose we have a pyramid the bottom of the pyramid is goal setting so if an athlete doesn't have a coach and a structure plan it's really hard to prop to proceed to the next things if an athlete comes to me and they're let's say on beginner to

intermediate level and they don't actually plan their week they don't have a calendar or a journal to plan the week then it's tricky to proceed with the next things now from goal setting where they want to go any specific races why they do this this is the foundation that we really need to know mostly an athlete really has to understand why they're practicing the sport in the beginning so this is the foundation after that comes mindfulness so mindfulness a bit of meditation skills this combination of the ability to shift the focus internally externally a bit of it and then comes self-talk and imagery in parallel because they influence each other quite a lot and then beyond soft talk and imagery comes confidence control arousal control anxiety control and above that comes flow state this is basically the highest thing you've got you you've got a lot of steps here and i think a lot of people want to skip to flow state because that's like the sexy thing that they all hear about yeah but what i'm hearing from you is start with the basics set your goals first as your initial framework yes then become more mindful and you can do that on a run you can do that in a more of a i guess what would be described as a traditional meditative setting yes but recently i've been trying and i i

like to use active i call it active mindfulness where you use mindfulness in an active setup while jogging let's say or preferably this is something i personally do and the closest athletes to me is uh doing the mobility before running in the morning first thing in the morning so we're breathing doing the mobility trying to feel our body and the mobility workout that we have somehow goes from tiptoes to just every single joint so you're scanning the body you're really focused internally and then once we move out to start the jog we go external a bit of both so this is this is a good practice to start with yeah and i found that a lot of athletes they they have an easier time adopting that mindfulness practice with a simple body scan because it gives an order to what they're trying to do i mean we're rational human beings a lot of runners are like super analytical people so if you tell them to start at the head and then go to the toes or start at the toes and then go up to the head and just giving that framework for they're like okay i can get it there's a start point and there's an end point just like a race and and once you develop all this package then you have succeeded in developing your own routines and routines are very important however uh i don't like anyone to be too much hooked up by their own routines because you never know what might happen you can't be too people are too attached to routine if something changes then they'll say i

haven't warmed up the right way i will not race well so this is something also we want we don't want everybody has experienced this when they miss their crew at an aid station right their crew doesn't show up and it complete like i've seen athletes get inordinately flustered that they didn't get their super specific chocolate gel at mile 32 and they had to settle for the raspberry gel that was on the aid station table and afterwards i just look at them i'm like you really think that that made that much of a difference right the flavor of the gel that you had like in the whole context of things out of the tens of thousands of steps that you took and the hundred miles that you ran or whatever the race was you think that that one pivotal point was that impactful or was it how you reacted to it yes okay so we've got this framework of goal setting first mindfulness second self-talk third control fourth and then flow fifth in a sequential order for athletes to actually work through self-talk and imagery come in parallel yep you can choose what to start first what but i prefer to start with self-talk because imagery needs uh you just have to sit and do it sometimes so this is like an extra step like you start to say okay three times a week i want to do specific imagery 15 minutes this is an extra step now if the athlete doesn't stretch already so i prefer that they stretch and they skip the imagery and we do some self-talk it's a it's a bit quicker with self-talk and i

i wouldn't say more efficient but um i mean imagery is good if you somehow have an injury something like this it it might help you not to lose specific skills or to be motivated but the self-talk can have a direct effect on performance simply because you're learning to manage your capacity so now we've got this framework of what to start with and then how to logically progress through the like this hierarchy of needs almost from a mental skills standpoint yeah and then we've also looked at it chronologically throughout the season of where we're focusing on kind of more rounded skills you know or more generalized skills like early in the season this permit can go in parallel with uh with the preparation to an event right so for example in base training phase you can just uh understand your goals understand some things do light stuff like the mindfulness uh and then gradually start to go and narrow down towards your event let's say imagery should be really interrelated with your race then it's a race specific phase right so and that's what i was getting to we've got this framework in terms of like the complexity of the skill like how an athlete it's just like you can you have to walk before you run right everybody knows that analogy that's because walking is an easier skill than running is to learn same thing with a high jump right you you evoke that earlier you have to learn your run up before you can learn the takeoff right it's the same same exact thing and so we've got that framework goal

setting mindfulness self-talk and imagery control and then flow and then we've got a chronological setup of like least specific to most specific just to try to generalize it right where all the race stuff comes out at the very end so then the third question is how does the how does an athlete not to put you out of business because i know this is this is like what you do how can an athlete look at themselves and say i need to work more on this and less on these because this is what you do initially when you when you intake an athlete right you you assess what they naturally do and i'm assuming that you can come up with okay they have really well developed skills here and not so well developed skills there now you've been able to do that because you're an expert in the field and you can pick those things out tricky to to do it on your own it's actually really tricky because i hear a lot of people saying let's say we're watching an event i would use i will keep using examples from track and field simply because you can see it in front of you yeah compared to on ultra where you hear what the athlete is saying and you might see them a bit so you see let's say a lot of people saying i look at this athlete he's mentally not so strong he's letting go always towards the end it kills me when i hear this because i feel like actually no they're not letting go they they started just a bit too fast they

just physiologically might not be able to hold it anymore now it's not always mental it might be but not always yeah but it could be more physiology what led them to letting go on the third uh on the second third of the race and okay it goes back to poor management perhaps so to do self-assessment and of course this athlete when they finish they will hear people like they say why did you let go and they will be like i don't know yeah they get confused yeah it confuses them and it will bring them back mentally more and more it will bring them to a low point it will kill their confidence actually yeah but in reality they are capable much more than you think they are capable of let's say sticking to the athlete if they stayed uh i don't know they didn't start pushing too much from the beginning in in the world half marathon championship if i'm not mistaken i i saw a couple of athletes just surging from the beginning and they didn't even make it to top 10 i was terrified when i saw it i was looking at these top athletes and asking myself why are they pushing the pace from the beginning and they're the best in the world we can even see this pattern of low capacity to control arousal and excitement even in the best athletes right but what you're getting at is it's it's hard to do this psychological assessment in terms like as as a person looking at themselves like i need i have these

skills and i don't have these skills and you compare that to a physical setting most runners will know hey i'm good at mountain terrain or i'm good at the marathon distance or i i really suck when i move down to the 1500 meters or whatever because they have this they have a very tangible compare and contrast with their competitors and with other prs and things like that what i'm hearing from you is is it's it's it's extremely difficult to have that uh to have that assessment internally with an individual person and those are the candidate those are the people that need to be candidates that need to go seek a specialist yeah but um do you make it really simple as simple assessments or simple um aspects of sports psychology or mental training that we most athletes should try to have answers to is first of all start with the why what makes you run not really why i like to ask what what makes you run what makes you wake up and do your training every day what makes you consistent or if you lack consistency what makes you lack consistency okay you'd say family work stuff like this that's acceptable and then you'd ask yourself different questions like how can i try to be consistent even with the life constraints yeah so stuff like this will allow you to really be a bit more confident to learn how to to understand that you're actually putting some effort to manage your time and then you can go to more delicate stuff um why am i afraid on the downhills compared to my peers why can they run downhill

better and i'm physically better than them so once we ask ourselves about our weaknesses then we're making a step forward by understanding first what's the obstacle once we highlight the obstacle then gradually without feeling it we will start to overcome that's so interesting because i've i've seen this year with the covid pandemic it is completely exposed athletes that don't have very strong whys because they don't yes i fully agree yeah they don't have they because they don't have the races to act as a band-aid or a temporary cover-up for that strong internal why because they just chase race to race to race race and that were i mean as we see now right that works to a certain extent but is not as powerful as saying okay if all of these like bright shiny objects just went away tomorrow which happened i mean we literally had that scenario happen with covid what are you going to do and the athletes with a really strong why they kind of got out of bed every morning and they figured it out yeah was it it wasn't easy they had to go through things that are difficult and they had to kind of readjust and things like that but the athletes without a strong why they kind of fell off the face of the earth you know there are no races to train for so why am i going to get out of bed at 5 a.m in the first phase of this pandemic i've noticed that athletes that did well um even with the cancellation of races are those who have

really good this mindful mindfulness capacity that's well developed because some of their whys were beyond races and i always try to develop this with some of my athletes to teach them to go beyond events beyond like goals not to be event related goals to be sensations the sensation of running itself track mountain whatever it is just the feelings of running itself once they are grounded and this is their why like if you ask me why do you wake up every day early in the morning to run i'll tell you i just love to run yeah if even if there's a race okay that's nice if there's a race if there isn't a race it's also the same nothing changes because um i'm rooted and grounded to just the sensations that i get from the run itself and um i try to teach some of my athletes to really try to to stay grounded to this and if they are really orient race oriented with time we try to shift their focus from this race orientation towards their inner sensations it's also a skill once they start to learn to feel it again then okay it becomes a bit different because i wouldn't say i blame but part of it comes from when they started to run they were too much motivated by races the coaches the events this type of orientation on the long run is not so good because if we with some discussions with elite athletes we saw

that okay they're definitely driven to break world records or certain records but they they just love to do the activity itself um i've had a lot of elite runners uh i've heard them say that they never felt they're compromising anything or sacrificing anything because they just love to run as much as they can in that case they put some effort to run not so much and not get injured but they just love to run one two three times a day for them it's they love it they want to be out doing it and this is what helps them succeed at ease so they don't really put effort to let's say cut a bit social life or stuff like this no it's never a sacrifice they just love it you know this finding your why it's become kind of cliche recently you know with the emergence of a lot of sports psychology tools and i mean i remember several years ago i i personally went through this uh through this exercise to kind of like reground myself and it and it ended up being really beneficial throughout 2020 because i could kind of come back to it but i drew on the work of simon sinek who wrote this book find your why it's a it's mainly a business book but i think that there's a lot of practical sports applications for it and the nickel version of it was is i took all of the things that i did consistently without prompting like just all the things in my life that i didn't have to do but i did anyway just because i enjoyed doing them and the three the the three

things were running i always run i don't and i didn't know why before this i always ran i i'm part of a 5013c i'm on the board of this 5013c here that manages a section of trail near pike speak and the third thing is is i just love mentoring other coaches so i did all these three things consistently nobody nobody has to pay me for them i don't get paid to be a runner obviously i don't get paid to be on the board of my 5013c that is definitely the case but what strings together those three activities that i enjoy them so much that i'll do them without prompt without compensation and i and i'll sink copious amounts of time into it and the thing that i came away from is is they're better after i have interacted with them than they were at the start i just like seeing that progress right i like seeing progress run i see like i like seeing the progress on the trail that we work on and i like seeing progress in other in other coaches and i was able to use that that's a really nickel version of the entire framework that i used to to draw that out but i was able to use that and then during the coveted pandemic when all this stuff went away it didn't bother me right because i was like i just like seeing myself improve right that's why i like running i don't know if that's something that you've experienced with the athletes that you the high performance athletes that you've worked with that are trying to figure out like why am i doing this thing in the first place for some yes but it just again it's something very individual uh it just depends on the

story of the runner what's their background what brought them to running in the first place and quick exercise i like to do with a lot of runners is to ask them if they can remember first time running your first time participating in an event how was it how did it go or if they were having really pressure for a certain event i try to ask them to recall a good performance just a good performance and i have noticed that a lot of them would say that they went to this race not really thinking about it so much um they want to relax it's not like um everything although it is everything they went in the mentality that we're just going to enjoy we're just going to do something we like to participate in an event and eventually they did well but they improved and with time let's say comes pressure from media pressure from clubs from peers to do better and better and better and here okay things have changed pressure from sponsors this is quite common with elite runners and i've always i've always seen just in practice that the runners that have already either intentionally or in some cases just unintentionally by a consequence of their upbringing they're really grounded in why they're doing what they're doing it doesn't matter how they get to that end point right whether they've gone through an intentional process or they just kind of kind of quote unquote get it but the ones that have

that grounding i always think that they're gonna overperform as they're gonna they're always gonna run above their pay grade i guess is what i'm saying right going back to our physiological and psychological model they're always going to perform at a higher percent of their physiological capacity because of that grounding and because of that strong why that they have yeah the why is is quite simple and as you said it's becoming a cliche and i've seen it a lot recently on so many blogs but the reason why we start with the why is because it it it can make you reflect to different aspects for example if i ask you now what makes you run what makes you run because i like to see progress okay um what are you seeking from running the enjoyment that i derive from seeing okay where i am now compared to where i was at a previous point in time okay what do you want to reach with this running no i i've never viewed it as an end goal i've always viewed it as small iterative processes of what i just mentioned continually getting better compared to where i was a month ago a year yes okay that's good um the way you're you have your goals somehow is really internal and performance oriented rather than event oriented so for example if if you are um a half marathoner you would um you don't really i feel that you might not really need races you

can track yourself with simple time trials you're improving that's good some athletes say oh we cannot we just just no races nothing because they're event oriented um and uh from the pandemic yes it a lot of sports psychologists shifted their focus by trying to really help athletes to be performance oriented rather than only external goal oriented nothing really internal yeah it was a hard shift i mean i know this was i've said this a number of times in interviews and written about it in articles yeah 2020 was definitely my most challenging year as a coach is also my most rewarding year as a coach even though there are no results to show from it right but the reward was in the challenge and seeing athletes progress going back to that word right in in different ways thank you for the for the assessment there i feel like i need to like lie down on a couch or something like that the next time we get on the horn i didn't know we're gonna get into that so that's totally cool um okay let's kind of wrap let's wrap this up man i can't tell you how fascinated i am with this area and how much i appreciate your time um we i think all athletes recognize this need to improve their mental skills and one of the ways that they can do that is through self-talk but as we mentioned earlier it's hard for a lot of athletes to know where to start because the framework is just hard to to wrap their heads around and it's very individualized but if they take some low-hanging fruit and at least get the ball rolling yeah that is a big part

in this whole process just start right and the things that they can start out with are finding a strong why that connects everything goal setting mindfulness and then self-talk and imagery those those things you can tell you can tell people how important they are across the whole thing but i think that any athlete with no mental skills training can at least start with those and get a pretty decent amount of progress done like for example you as a coach um you use training peaks you already do a lot of the goal setting work for the athletes they just open training peaks they see the weekly training they know okay today i have this and this and that they would schedule their uh let's say their work meetings and whatever according to all this so you already have done you laid down a foundation for their goal setting event okay initially before you laid down this whole training they already have a goal periodized plan so you've done a huge chunk from their goal goal goal setting phase now yes it is important to reconnect and know a bit why they're doing this whenever things become a bit hard especially in those cold early mornings or warm summers at least for me yeah so i try to reconnect with these things a bit and then yes choose i like the athlete to choose what suits them best if they feel like they need this they're too anxious too race driven then yes mindfulness would be something nice to work on and then yes

just work on mindfulness for a month let's say do mindful stretching a basic body scan just twice a week or once you wake up it takes it takes a minute reading right right if you want to make it more developed like personally i don't like this one hour meditation stuff if you're not completely into meditation but for athletes to improve performance meditation is good but i have never experienced someone actually getting this full benefit from let's say half an hour meditation it just takes so much time if you're a busy athlete then you could use this half an hour somewhere else maybe stretching would be more beneficial everyone skips that i know so we're pretty so a bit of mindfulness within the stretching try to feel the muscle fibers or imagine them a bit a lot of research showed like if you imagine your muscle fibers building up after a hard workout you can actually accelerate recovery some research even showed that if you imagine uh that you're developing more capillaries during a job that you will actually develop more capillaries so these are little basic stuff to be done all that research is just so fascinating the fact that you can't actually control that psychologically and you really shouldn't be able to it's just absolutely amazing it's all right you can really assess yourself with imagery let's say yeah right by let's say now you can imagine yourself uh holding let's say two kilo dumbbell with one hand let's say right hand and

then try to do a curl but let's imagine five kilo and try to feel it and then 10 and then 15 i've had a lot of let's say when i'm giving a lecture a lot of people say ah 15 it's too much and i realized that they actually felt the weight they got into this internally because they were sport audience everyone have done a bicep curl let's say and some people were like we've reached the limitation and then i asked him okay you've used your right hand of which i've used now a bit quickly and if i put both here the right hand is actually a bit warmer it's actually sweating not the left one so this is quite basic and quick it activated my right arm everything is ready to perform uh capillaries are ready it's ready so this is a basic assessment of imagery if some people would tell me no i didn't really feel it then i know their imagery area needs some more work so there's an actual there's an actual like physiological manifestation of doing some of this imagery work that shows up in a very real setting yes golly so fascinating man all right we're gonna let you go this is great um maybe we can bring you or one of your colleagues back on and we can go like all over all of that fascinating research because that's just i mean that's that's stuff that's just mind-blowing right the fact that these things actually happen in a mindfulness a meditation setting or imagery setting and things like that i just i just i just can't get enough of it but i really appreciate your time um why don't you take a second tell

listeners where they can find you and a little bit more about your work okay um i studied sports psychology in the university of tessaly in greece and soon i'll be starting my PhD in self-talk in specific that's my field of research um i basically work online um just by via contacting me on instagram let's say quite basic and then we do most of our work via zoom calls um usually if i'm working one on one with an athlete it will be one to two calls a week not more than this especially once we reach practical phase where we do just two calls a week no more than half an hour usually um i like to use either final search or if the athlete has training peaks to lay down the actual um mental skills program on it so uh yeah that's pretty much it that's awesome thank thank you for what you do i think practitioners like yourself that can blend the research side and the practice side as we were talking about earlier yeah you guys you folks are extremely beneficial in the sports science world and it is not it is not an easy uh it's not easy to correlate those two and actually kind of come out and practice especially in your field so i'm very appreciative of it of it it's always my pleasure to really spread how things work and to help in developing uh sports psychology and athletes awesome we'll keep doing it man we'll revisit this sometime soon thank you

and there you go folks much thanks to kareem for coming on the podcast today i have to say that that was one of my favorite episodes to record i've put some links in the show notes to where you can find kareem and learn a little bit more about his work if you want to sharpen up your mental skills and speaking of the season ultra season is coming around the races are coming back online and if you think that one of our coaches can help you out with any big hairy and audacious goals you have hit me up on social media it's at Jason Koop with a k either on twitter or on instagram or you can check out any of our coaching packages at www.trainride.com we would love to see how we can help you achieve your goals for this year thank you guys for listening and as always we will see you out on the trails video